KDE

Just hours after the release of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, the developers behind the KDE Neon GNU/Linux distribution have announced the availability of a new version that ships with Plasma 5.11.

Tuesday, 10 Oct 2017. Today KDE publishes this autumn's Plasma feature release, KDE Plasma 5.11. Plasma 5.11 brings a redesigned settings app, improved notifications, a more powerful task manager. Plasma 5.11 is the first release to contain the new “Vault”, a system to allow the user to encrypt and open sets of documents in a secure and user-friendly way, making Plasma an excellent choice for people dealing with private and confidential information.

Recently, I opened a new online account at a new institution. Unfortunately, they do not provide a direct online access using a protocol such as HBCI or OFX which are already integrated into KMyMoney, but only a web frontend. So what, I thought, I won’t use it on a daily basis and can probably live with manually entering the transactions into the ledger.

I am pleased to announce that Qt 5.10 Beta 1 is now released. Convenient online binary installers are available for trying out features coming in Qt 5.10. We will follow similar Beta process as with Qt 5.9 and provide multiple Beta releases via the online installer.

After David’s post, I got a few mails asking whether this change has anything to do with the project I started last summer, so I decided to provide a small update.

My original plan was to ship a test version of Blade a few months after the project announcement, but that did not happen. The main reason was that there were some higher-priority things in Plasma I needed to work on, so I had to put this on hold a bit.

While the project is not yet made public, some important things have happened that moved it forward quite a bit.

I told you this was a beauty. It elegantly goes against all the accepted conventions of the Plasma desktop, including hidden desktop icons, task manager launchers linking to hidden icons, and Windows software running through WINE playing ball. All of this can be done relatively simply, quickly, easily, without any great messing about. I hope you like.

One last thing, notice how my screenshots above no longer have any shadow, which is something that both Ksnapshot and Spectacle always do, if you use compositing? Well, that's another secret we will resolve next time!

Clazy is a clang plugin which extends the compiler with over 50 warnings related to Qt best practices ranging from unneeded memory allocations to API misuse. It’s an opensource project spawned by KDAB’s R&D efforts for better C++ tooling.

And here I am writing on the blog after a long time.
This time it’s about talking about my new project, becoming a developer!
Unfortunately I can not study full time (in fact you see the results), however, I am to show you the “results” of my study.
Thanks to the Kirigami module developed by Marco Martin and the ease of QtQuick here is my first application, that is, the Alpha version. The application for now is called “Notation”, but I will definitely make a vote for the names (suggest the names in the comments below).

The refactoring branch of Kdenlive is progressing nicely and we hope to merge our code to master in the last days of october to meet the KDE Applications 17.12 release schedule. Today we updated the AppImages of both stable and refactoring branch.

The first point release update to GNOME 3.26 is pretty much out (save for an official announcement). The first of many such releases, GNOME 3.26.1 brings with it bug fixes, performance tuning, and a few other minor tweaks.

It has been several years since last seeing an update to the Amarok open-source music player, but it looks like it may be alive and ticking after all, at least with one developer working towards a KF5/Qt5 port.

Amarok is among the many KDE/Qt aligned media players from Juk, Cantata, Babe, Elisa, and others, but Amarok really hasn't been updated in quite a while. A Phoronix reader pointed out that a developer is indeed working on a port to using KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 and posted some initial patches back in September.

It's been a long time! I have been very busy with my PhD but this particular semester I have more time to volunteer to KDE so I thought the fact that the Ohio Linux Fest was happening close to me was a good opportunity to do some KDE promo in USA.

I ended up being caught up in the middle of many deadlines just before the event, so I had very little time to prepare the promo material that I was going to show. I was somehow able to modify some Plasma artwork that was available for ISO sizes just in time for printing for the Ohio Linux Fest. I also borrowed a laptop with modest hardware, where I had Neon 5.10 running.

I’m very pleased with the results: An idle Plasma Desktop doesn’t wake up the CPU, which is something we worked on avoiding for years. Furthermore, idling, I get a battery drain rate of less than 4 watt, which is pretty exceptional. Bottom line: Our work hasn’t been in vain and shows that Plasma is pretty well optimized to get the most out of your battery. This is especially interesting for Plasma Mobile of course, but benefits laptop users as well. It’s a nice example how our work on convergence benefits all users. And polar bears.

Even with the introduction of new Linux desktop environments over the years, GNOME and KDE remain major players in the Linux desktop arena. Both desktops are mature, and come with a rock solid history of innovation and have legions of users.

In this article, I’ll compare GNOME and KDE’s stark differences. I’ll also explain the strengths and weaknesses between the two desktops as well.

More in Tux Machines

Debian-Based Q4OS Linux Distro to Get a New Look with Debonaire Desktop Theme

Q4OS is a small GNU/Linux distribution based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux operating system and built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). It's explicitly designed to make the Microsoft Windows to Linux transition accessible and more straightforward as possible for anyone.
Dubbed Debonaire, the new desktop theme uses dark-ish elements for the window titlebar and panel. Somehow it resembles the look and feels of the acclaimed Arc GTK+ theme, and it makes the Q4OS operating system more modern than the standard look offered by the Trinity Desktop Environment.

today's leftovers

Emmabuntüs recently released a video where they explain the goals and reasons of the project, current achievements and show people who really use this operating system. You can also see the members of the project live.

The U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued the second draft of the proposed update to the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity—also known as the Cybersecurity Framework. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) encourages all relevant stakeholders to submit draft comments to NIST by the deadline on Friday, January 19, 2018.

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon.
Thanks to Phoronix reader Fran for pointing out that VLC 3.0 release candidates have begun to not much attention. VLC 3.0 RC1 was tagged at the end of November and then on Tuesday marked VLC 3.0 RC2 being tagged, but without any official release announcements.

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes.
Cryptsetup 2.0.0 is notable in that it introduces support for the new on-disk LUKS2 format but still retaining support for LUKS(1). The LUKS2 format is security hardened to a greater extent, more extensible than LUKS, supports in-place upgrading from LUKS, and other changes.

There is no doubt Facebook is one of the most popular and dynamic social network platform in the modern Internet era. It has revolutionized technology, social networking, and the future of how we live and interact. With Facebook, We can connect, communicate with one another, instantly share our memories, photos, files and even money to anyone, anywhere in the world. Even though Facebook has its own official messenger, some tech enthusiasts and developers are developing alternative and feature-rich apps to communicate with your buddies. The one we are going to discuss today is Caprine. It is a free, elegant, open source, and unofficial Facebook messenger desktop app built with Electron framework.

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems.
Without XWayland for providing legacy X11 support to KDE Wayland clients, the KWin compositor fires up so fast that it can cause a crash in their Wayland integration as KWin's internal connection isn't even established... Yep, Wayland compositors are much leaner and cleaner than the aging X Server code-base that dates back 30+ years, granted most of the XWayland code is much newer than that.

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon.
IWD is a lightweight daemon for managing WiFi devices via a D-Bus interface and has been in development since 2013 (but was only made public in 2016) and just depends upon GCC / Glibc / ELL (Embedded Linux Library).

Linux Foundation: Servers, Kubernetes and OpenContrail

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of the Kubernetes open-source community, grew wildly this year. It welcomed membership from industry giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and broke attendance records at last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Austin, Texas. This is all happy news for Kubernetes — the favored platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). The technology needs all the untangling, simplifying fingers it can get.
This is also why most in the community are happy to tamp down their competitive instincts to chip away at common difficulties. “You kind of have to,” said Michelle Noorali (pictured), senior software engineer at Microsoft and co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America & Europe 2017. “These problems are really hard.”

Network slicing is poised to play a pivotal role in the enablement of 5G. The technology allows operators to run multiple virtual networks on top of a single, physical infrastructure. With 5G commercialization set for 2020, many are wondering to what extend network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) can help move network slicing forward.

Juniper Networks has announced its intent to move the codebase for OpenContrail, an open-source network virtualisation platform for the cloud, to the Linux Foundation. OpenContrail provides both software-defined networking (SDN) and security features and has been deployed by various organisations, including cloud providers, telecom operators and enterprises to simplify operational complexities and automate workload management across diverse cloud environments.

Juniper Networks plans to move the codebase for its OpenContrail open-source network virtualization platform for the cloud to the Linux Foundation, broadening its efforts to drive more software innovations into the broader IT and service provider community.
The vendor is hardly a novice in developing open source platforms. In 2013, Juniper released its Contrail products as open sourced and built a user and developer community around the project. To drive its next growth phase, Juniper expanded the project’s governance, creating an even more open, community-led effort.

The annual Open Source Jobs Report from Dice and The Linux Foundation reveals a lot about prospects for open source professionals and hiring activity in the year ahead. In this year’s report, 86 percent of tech professionals said that knowing open source has advanced their careers. Yet what happens with all that experience when it comes time for advancing within their own organization or applying for a new roles elsewhere?